A Savage Pantsing
by Twinings
Summary: There is something strange afoot at Arkham Asylum. It's up to two intrepid medical students to learn the truth about Dr. Crane and his experiments.
1. Introductions

This is not a comedy, although it was intended to be. I dedicate it to Niki, my own Al and second Robin. May she pants many and never die.

I don't own Batman or any of his pals. I don't own Cillian Murphy's face (I would be much prettier if I did) although I am perfectly willing to put it on my Scarecrow. I don't even own Herbert West. Sue me only if you're desperate.

A Savage Pantsing

Alice had a death wish. That was the only thing I could think.

I was a third-year pre-med student when Al blew into my life like some female Herbert West. She showed up at my apartment in the middle of the night, asking if I needed a roommate. I wondered if she'd heard that my old roommate had cracked under the pressure of fall exams and would be spending the rest of the year in Arkham, but as it turned out, Al was a transfer student from Gotham City College, on the other side of town, and she had been going door-to-door hoping for a stroke of luck so she could avoid a commute. That's the kind of girl she was, proactive in her own weird way.

Thick, horn-rimmed glasses and a button-down shirt made her look pretty harmless, so I decided to give her a chance. It was the best, and worst, decision of my life.

Her major was psychology, and I was pre-med, but we had the same ultimate goal: psychiatry. Gotham University was the perfect location for us, within walking distance of both Gotham General and Arkham Asylum (although any idiots who tried walking home from either one after dark usually got no less than they deserved.) The reason Al transferred to Gotham U, I learned, was because she had landed a very prestigious undergrad internship working under Dr. Jonathan Crane at Arkham.

My psych professor had encouraged me to apply for the same internship the semester before, but I decided I'd rather have a job than an unpaid internship, since I enjoyed eating and sleeping inside a building. I did get to work around the famous Dr. Crane, though. Not that he spent much of his time in the laundry room, but I did see him around every once in a while.

Al's internship started in mid-December, so she and I rode the bus home together every night for a couple of weeks without getting to know each other. It wasn't until Christmas Eve that we had our first real conversation.

I was sitting in the living room, drinking cocoa, watching the snow fall, and feeling depressed.

You know how the snow falls in some places, in big, thick flakes that create these sparkling snowdrifts that transform the world into a winter wonderland?

The snow doesn't fall like that in Gotham. In Gotham, the snow looks dirty before it ever hits the ground. It's never powdery, always wet, and Gotham snow never sticks. It just turns the sidewalks to ice.

Al came in from that miserable weather smiling. From the depths of my usual holiday depression, I decided that this could not stand.

"What are you still doing here?" I asked. "I thought you'd be spending Christmas with your family." She didn't lose her smile.

"Dad's in prison. You must have heard about the arrest. Very high-profile."

"Wait, you mean you're Big Al Hare's daughter?"

"Yep. Broke his heart when I decided not to take over the family business." She sat down next to me and stole my cocoa. "How about you? Any skeletons in your family closet?"

"Just my family." She choked.

"Sorry. You're an orphan?" I shrugged.

"Not quite, but I haven't seen my dad since I was a kid. Would you like some hot cocoa?" I asked pointedly as she took another sip from my mug. She didn't take the hint.

"How about your mom?" _None of your business,_ I thought. My mother was dead; she had spent the last years of her life in Arkham, something I didn't want to talk about to a total stranger. When I didn't answer, Al said, "Mine ran off with Dad's accountant, so he took a hit out on her. Bet you can't top that."

Fair enough; I didn't try.

On Christmas Day, I went with Al to visit her father in prison. He was a very nice middle-aged man who called his daughter Princess and told me I was a charming young lady. I thought she was going to slip him a pack of cigarettes, but before we left, he was the one who gave her a wad of cash and told her to buy herself something nice. When I asked her about it later, she laughed and told me he didn't smoke.

After that, we went across the street to the park. It's sad when the prison is in a better part of town than the hospital and the university, but that's Gotham for you. Al rented two pairs of ice skates and tried to drag me out on the pond. I declined, so Al skated by herself for an hour while I drank apple cider and watched the snow fall. It was the nicest snow I've ever seen in Gotham.

We had a lovely Christmas, and thus our friendship was begun.

We walked over to Arkham together the next day, trudging through the frozen slush that would be melted and gone by noon. Some places look picturesque with a little snow, even Gotham snow, covering the sharp edges.

Not Arkham.

When I was a little girl, the other kids used to say the place was haunted. I believed the ghost stories. Who wouldn't? The place was bleak, it was dark, it was the stuff of any child's nightmares. Howard Phillips Lovecraft himself would have cringed to walk through those foreboding iron gates.

"How did you end up working in such a doomful place?" Al asked as she punched in her security code. The old oak doors swung open on their own like the bad special effects in an old horror movie.

"It's just a building. I stopped believing in ghosts a long time ago." We flashed our IDs at the security guard, even though he knew us both. I usually spent a few minutes chatting with him; he was a nice guy with a large family he was very proud of. That day I was late, though, so I just waved and let him corner Al with baby pictures while I headed down the back stairs.

I envied Al. Her job wasn't all fun and games—she had to tour the violent ward with no one but skinny little Dr. Crane, whereas I had two mammoth orderlies backing me up when I went in to change the bedding. But sometimes Dr. Crane sent her for coffee while he made those rounds, and she did spend most of her time in the front offices, which might not have been cheery, but at least they had some light. I was stuck down in the basement, next to Ward 5.

Back then, Arkham was divided into four separate wards. Recovery Ward was for patients who were expected to be released soon. "Soon" could be relative, of course—my mother stayed there for nearly two years before she released herself—but the patients there were rarely a danger to themselves or others. They were the only ones we called patients. The inmates of the Long-Term Ward were the incurables. We considered some of them pretty big-time criminals in those days, before Harvey Dent lost face and the Joker discovered the ultimate punchline. Ward 3 was suicide watch. It had no permanent residents, but it always seemed to be full. Go figure.

The High-Security Ward, a.k.a. the Violent Ward, was the place where no one wanted to go. A few of the inmates were rich men who knew their only choices were Arkham or the chair, and paid well for the privilege of a private room. We all knew about them, and no one really begrudged Dr. Crane the extra income. After all, it was safer to have them in there than out on the streets, and it wasn't like anyone had ever escaped Ward 4. Not yet.

But there were other people in Ward 4. One who attacked a nurse and tried to eat her tongue. One who left a permanent dent in the padded wall with his face (or someone else's, we were never quite sure.) One who gouged out his own eye with a plastic spork because he was tired of the color of the walls. Just standing in the hallway outside the rooms, you could almost feel them clawing at you. The ones who weren't insane to begin with got there pretty quick.

The screaming never stopped.

I figured that was where the stories about Ward 5 began.

Supposedly, there was a fifth ward in the basement of the asylum, accessible only by a set of hidden stairs in the boiler room. It was supposed to be worse than Ward 4. I couldn't imagine how.

Some people even said that the Dracula Man (who we'd come to know as Batman later on) was an escapee from Ward 5, the victim of some crazy experiments gone horribly wrong. I didn't believe in caped mutants and mad scientists in the basement any more than I believed that the souls of the damned wandered Arkham's shadowed halls, but I will admit that I felt a moment of fear every time the pipes moaned or the ducts made the screams from the Violent Ward seem to come from directly under my feet.

That day, it was relatively quiet.

There were four industrial washing machines down there, and I was always stuck with the one closest to the boiler room because I told them it didn't bother me. That wasn't exactly true, but I was willing to pretend for the kind of money they paid us. Even with the good wages, more than a few lower-level employees got scared off during their first few days on the job. But I've always considered myself practical enough not to let a few spooky noises and crazy superstitions scare me away from a steady paycheck.

I knew this was going to be a good day when I went to get my cart and heard nothing but the rattling of the pipes. Then I learned that I was assigned to Recovery.

Recovery was the easiest ward to work, although I honestly preferred Long-Term or Suicide Watch, and sometimes switched with the others when they were too stressed to deal with the real crazies. But Recovery was fairly nice, considering. The paint might be peeling from the walls, but at least they still looked like the walls of a decrepit old mansion that had been loved and lived in long ago, not just a loony bin with no room for hope and no need for charm. The windows there were barred, but big enough to look out of, although there wasn't much to see. Some of them even had curtains, though any patients who had been in the suicide ward learned that Dr. Crane considered curtains a privilege, not a right.

He felt that way about a lot of things, including elevators, apparently. Ours was broken, so I dragged my laundry cart up half a flight of stairs before my orderlies showed up to help me. Bob was a man old enough to be my grandfather; Frank was my age and built like a brick wall. We called them Master Blaster behind their backs, but they were my favorite guys to work with because Bob and I could keep up a conversation while Frank beat the unruly ones into submission. Not that any of the more rational ones ever tried anything with Frank the Tank in the room.

"Quiet today," old Bob said as Frank took the cart from me.

"Yes, sir," I answered. "I'm glad they give us a break every once in a while." He glared at me like I was a fool for even thinking such a thing.

"Young lady, I done worked here since before you was born. I know what quiet means, and it ain't no rest for the wicked. Ain't that right, Frank?" Frank grunted. "You mark my words, that young Crane fellow will be calling the old black-and-whites 'fore the day is through."

"Maybe so, Mr. Bob." (He never did tell me his last name, but he got awfully miffed when a young person called him by his first.) "Anyway, if anything is going to go horribly wrong, we probably ought to get the sheets changed first."

Bob muttered something about whippersnappers and suffragettes but let it go at that, a sure sign that he was feeling the weather in his joints. When he was in a good mood, he could harangue me for hours.

The first room in the Recovery Ward belonged to a pair of elderly ladies, one who heard the voice of God through her hearing aid, and one who had shot her grandson's puppy in the head because, and I quote: "It was a bad influence, leading my sweet little Eddie down the wrong path with those other hooligans and their evil rock and roll drug shows."

The puppy-killer was nowhere to be seen, so I greeted Mrs. Robinson, loudly, so as to be heard over the voice of the Lord.

"Vera ain't here," she said helpfully as I began stripping the beds.

"Yes, ma'am, I can see that. Do you know where she is?"

"Jesus done told me she ain't bent for Heaven."

"Well, does Jesus know where she is? You know she isn't supposed to go out on her own.

Mrs. Robinson sighed and gave me a watery look that could have meant almost anything.

"She went to the bathroom."

That satisfied me; I couldn't really blame the old lady for wanting to use a nice clean toilet instead of a rusty bedpan, or worse, the bed I was currently fitting with crisp, white sheets.

"They found her not five minutes ago," Mrs. Robinson continued, mumbling to herself now. "Up all night crying, she was. Saying her Eddie wanted her to die. Jesus Christ Almighty Hisself told her to keep it down. She didn't listen."

I dropped my sheets.

"Told you," said Bob.

When I ran back out into the hall, I saw the people clustered around the bathroom door. Doctors, nurses, patients, all crowded together. Chaos. There was Dr. Crane, his gaze intense, and Al, looking more upset than I'd ever seen her.

"Suicide" was a whisper that went through the crowd like a contagious disease.

"I didn't think it was possible to kill yourself that way," Frank said, his deep voice hushed and fearful. Standing on my tiptoes, I saw what he saw: a little old lady in a musty gray bathrobe the exact color of her straggly, wet hair, slumped over the toilet like a co-ed who'd had too much to drink.

"Happened here once before," Bob said…

…and suddenly I was nineteen again, sitting in the new administrator's office, feeling an unreasoning fear of his piercing blue eyes as he patiently, even kindly, explained that my mother…

…and then I could almost see her, my sad, beautiful mother, sneaking out of her room at night to kill herself, stuffing her socks into the drain in the bathroom sink, patiently waiting for the water to rise, plunging her face into the icy water…

"…before your time," Bob was saying. "Real pretty young thing. She used the sink, though. Too good to die in toilet water."

I turned away from them, leaning on the wall for support, as Bob launched into a story about a man who saved his own urine in a hidden bedpan, but ultimately failed to drown in it.

"Awful, isn't it?" Al said, coming over to join me. "She was so jumpy yesterday, Dr. Crane switched her to a stronger sedative. She should have been getting better, but some of the other patients say they heard her screaming last night." She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "You don't think it was more than just suicide, do you?"

"There was no sign of a struggle," I said.

"How do you know that? You just got here." I shrugged.

"Lucky guess."


	2. Plans

Al and I walked over to the bus stop with most of the rest of the Arkham staff that night. No one who could have afforded a car would have driven it in that part of town, so even some of the doctors rode the number nine bus with us.

Al didn't start talking until we got home.

"I got a chance to look at Dr. Crane's files today," she said. "The new drug he put that old lady on was called scorbuticroton."

"So?"

"So there's no such drug, or if it is, it isn't a sedative."

"And how would you know that?"

"Come on. A scorbutic is a person with scurvy, and croton oil is like ipecac. Or maybe Ex-Lax, I don't remember."

"So you think scorbuticroton is a code for something else?"

"Yes, and that's not all," she said, breathless with excitement. "Every other patient I've found with any mention of this drug was either moved to Suicide Watch, heavily confined in the Violent Ward, or transferred to the State Psychiatric Hospital in Metropolis."

"But not dead?"

"I don't know about that," she said. "Corpsey files go to a separate filing system. I don't have access."

"Well, where is it?" I asked reasonably, feeling the tiniest thrill of excitement. It had been years since I had played Nancy Drew, solving the petty crimes committed by the children of the Narrows. Back then I had called myself The World's Greatest Detective. (Years later, when Batman took on that title along with his many others, I felt mildly let down.)

"Is little miss nose-in-a-book interested in a little sleuthing?"

"Hey, serious girls can solve mysteries, too. I mean, someone has to be the brains of the operation. I don't want to see the results if you try to go all Scooby Doo and get shot in the face by Old Man Bolton."

"Jinkies!" Al said brightly. "The files are in an old office inside Dr. Crane's. I mean, past it—well, you can only get to it by going through Dr. Crane's office. You know. And of course he has the only key. But don't worry, gang. I have a plan."

I was afraid to ask her what it was.

--

The next day was business as usual. I spent hours bleaching stains out of straitjackets, all of them blood this time. Al followed Dr. Crane and watched him like a hawk. There were no more prescriptions, she told me, of the scurvy purgy.

Near the end of the shift, I absentmindedly dragged my cart of soiled linens into the bathroom with me. It came out quite a bit heavier than when it went in.

Old Bob noticed me struggling with it. No one could ever slip a thing past that man.

"Seems like there's more laundry than patients some days," he said, eyeing the cart with some suspicion.

"Yes, sit. But that's the last of it, thank God."

That sidetracked him into giving me a lecture about taking the Lord's name in vain that lasted until we reached the basement stairs.

"I wish they'd get that elevator fixed," I sighed. "Mr. Bob, these stairs must be murder on your knees."

He mumbled and grumbled for a few minutes, but finally took the hint and stayed upstairs while Frank carried the cart for me.

It was hospital policy for the orderlies to probe the laundry with the pointy end of a broom before leaving it. More than once, a patient had tried to make a break for the ventilation system that led from the boiler room to the street. Of course, most of the pipes had been redirected to the roof years ago, which led to one or two red faces when the escapees took the wrong pipe and got stuck halfway.

When Frank reached for the broom, I stopped him.

He was a sweet guy, good-looking, smarter than people gave him credit for, and I had seen the way he looked at me.

I don't guess I really need to go into the how of it, but I thoroughly distracted Frank from following hospital procedure.


	3. Fears

I stopped to chat with the guard on my way out. Then, when everyone else was gone, I put on a ditzy expression and giggled.

"Darn it, I left my keys down in the laundry room. I'll be back."

"I can come with you as soon as Burt comes along to relieve me," he offered.

"Oh, don't worry about me," I said gaily. "I'm not afraid of ghoulies in the dark."

"But I don't want you walking outside by yourself." I thought fast for a good excuse.

"A friend from school is picking me up. We're going clubbing." God, that sounded stupid even to me. Not only had I never for the briefest moment entertained the notion of going clubbing, I hadn't even made any close friends at school, unless Al counted.

He let me go, though. That was all I needed.

I went straight to the washing machine nobody else would touch, the one right next to the boiler room door, and helped Al out of it.

"Took you long enough," she said irritably. Just then, someone let out a piercing scream from directly behind us. We both dove for cover, and I said something not very ladylike. Then I started laughing.

There was no one there, of course.

"This place is even spookier at night. I hope we don't have to stay here too long."

"We can't go upstairs until we're sure Dr. Crane has gone home," she reminded me.

Fair enough; to pass the time, I told her some of the stories of Ward 5. The next time the pipes carried a scream, we nearly knocked each other down racing up the stairs.

"I think…it's time we got to work," Al said when we had our backs firmly pressed against the door.

Those old, familiar hallways were different at night, without the hum of quiet conversation, without the taunting little glimpses of sunlight, without Frank the Tank and crotchety old Bob to back me up.

If Al hadn't been there, I would have cut and run. But she didn't give in to her fear, so neither did I.

In some places, the harsh overhead lights flickered like another bad horror movie, but most of the lights were turned off to conserve power. The hallway outside Dr. Crane's office was as black as sin. Al still managed to pick the lack, but it took longer than we'd expected. Luckily, Al knew where he kept an emergency flashlight in his desk. I held it for her while she worked on the lock to the inner office.

"I can't do this," she decided after an hour of fumbling. I was almost glad to hear it. My arm was tired.

"Tell me we haven't completely wasted all that effort," I begged.

"Not quite. We can still do a nice, thorough search of the current files. Let me have the flashlight; you see if there's anything useful in his desk."

I rifled through the drawers and found nothing more interesting than a large collection of shining black feathers. Al rifled through the files and found about the same. Then I found the locked drawer.

I took another bobby pin from my hair and inserted it in the lock. Hearing the rattling, Al turned the light on me.

"You're turning a lock, not stabbing it in the eye," she said. "Here, let me." In seconds, she had the drawer open. The flashlight reflected off a dozen brown glass bottles, each hand-labeled. I picked out one and held it to the light.

"Scarecrow," I read. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"It's Dr. Crane's handwriting." I opened the bottle, revealing a thick white powder. "Looks like flour," Al said.

Stupidly, I leaned over and sniffed it.

First there was the smell of blood and Al's voice irately snarling, "Moron!"

Then no sensation at all, no sight, no sound, no sense that I had a body at all.

And then, within the space of a breath, I was back in the water on my fourth birthday, heavy skates stopping my baby legs from kicking, my ratty wool coat doing nothing against the cold, just more weight dragging me down.

Feel: cold like knives in my limbs, pressure crushing the air from my lungs.

Hear: rushing water, slowing heart.

Taste: ice and bile and coppery fear.

See: my own mother, viewed through a sheet of ice, young, sane, screaming, hacking at the ice with one of her own skates.

I screamed bubbles and reached up for the wavering image of safety, shrinking with every second as I sank deeper and deeper into the water.

A part of me remembered this, that here I lost consciousness, and soon I was rescued. That part of me also knew that this time there would be no rescue, not even unconsciousness to relieve the grasping terror. Only the cold, airless depths. Forever.

…and then I was lying on the floor in Dr. Crane's office, my head in Al's lap, trying to scream against her hand as she held me still.

"Y equals mx plus b," she said firmly. I drew a shuddery breath, and she took her hand away from my mouth. "Quadratic formula: x equals…"

"N…negative…" I took a deeper breath. "Negative b plus or minus, um…the square root of…the square root of b squared minus four ac over two a."

"You okay now?"

"F-f-fine." I curled up into a ball, shivering.

And then, I was fourteen and my mother was breaking down, and my father's voice spoke in my ear: "It runs in the blood, you know." He continued, speaking aloud what he had only implied before: "you did this to her and she'll do it to you and that's why I'll never love you, and you—"

"Seven times twelve!"

"Eighty…four," I said, and wiped the tears from my eyes. "I guess now we know what it does."

---

Al must have gone through hell getting me home that night. I don't remember. The waking nightmares kept hitting me, though decreasing in frequency, duration, and intensity as the night went on. By the end of the night, I could hear Al over the voices of my childhood demons, prompting me with math problems and formulas, forcing my rational mind to focus on something other than the fear.

When I was lucid, I still found myself gripped by the memory of my mother when she lost control and began to see things that weren't there. At those times, Al was still with me, reminding me that every light in the apartment was blazing, that I was cocooned in blankets to keep out the cold—mostly, that I wasn't alone.

At the end, I dreamed that she got fed up and abandoned me. Then I heard her voice calmly repeating the Pythagorean Theorem. After that I fell asleep and didn't dream.


	4. Questions

The next day, Al called in for me. I didn't even wake up until well after she got home.

"I have a plan," she said when I stumbled into the kitchen.

"No. I am not going anywhere near that man again. You take your plan and—"

"We drug him."

"Drug him?" I repeated, fully intrigued by the thought of Jonathan Crane lying on the floor, crying and begging us to end his torment.

"Yeah, knock him out and steal his keys."

"Oh."

"I'll stay with him while you check the files. If he wakes up early, I'll stall him long enough for you to get away."

"Oh. And what are we supposed to do with these files, anyway?"

"We call the police once we have proof that he's up to no good." I glared at her. "Well, sorry, but I don't think you qualify as proof."

"And I don't think your plan qualifies as smart. Why not call the police now and let them get the proof."

"I'll let you smack him around a little."

Fair enough.

--

I spent the next day jumping at every sound, chanting a variable mantra. Every scream was ripped from the throats of the damned souls in the basement. Sine. Every walking lobotomy in a hospital gown was a ghost from the beyond. Cosine. Every time I passed Dr. Crane in the hall, his look told me he knew what I was up to and was just waiting for a chance to give me a full dose of his drug. Tangent.

I wanted to kill him. I wanted to hide. Mostly I wanted my mother.

As soon as I could slip away unseen, I went to visit my old roommate in Recovery. She was looking much more like her old self, still too ready to laugh at nothing, but a vast improvement over the last time I'd seen her. She looked much better than I felt. They would probably be releasing her soon.

I always have attracted the unstable ones. Harleen wasn't at all bothered by my request to hide under her bed until the nightly headcount was done and the daytime staff went home.

From under the bed, I heard Al's voice, and that of Dr. Crane, and Harleen's answering giggle as she bounced on the springs above me. The lights went off, and I heard the door close. Al didn't lock it.

After a few minutes, I slid my way out into the open air. In the moonlight, Harleen's grin looked almost demonic.

"So, whatcha up to, shug?" she asked perkily.

"Oh, you'll probably hear all about it soon." I hugged her and wished her the best of luck. She would have laughed if she had known the way things would turn out.

I slipped outside and down the hall, into the bathroom across the hall from the doctors' lounge.

"You don't look so good, Dr. Crane." I could hear Al speaking clearly; the same ducts that carried the screams would carry her voice directly to me as long as we both stayed near the vents. "Maybe you should have a cup of coffee."

"Coffee? You made coffee this late at night?" His voice made my skin crawl.

"Well, yes. You told me to."

"I did no such thing." He sounded patient, slightly amused.

"You did, Dr. Crane." Laughing. "Before we started the rounds. You said you would be working late, and…"

"Oh, yes. It had completely slipped my mind."

"You work so hard, doctor. You look like you need a good rest." Half innocent seductress, half caring mother in her voice. Oh, she was good. "Let me pour you a cup. Do you mind if I join you? I'm getting started on my thesis, and I have _so_ many questions to ask you."

They moved away from the vents then, but I could still hear them speaking, though I couldn't understand what they said. Al asked her questions in a hypnotic, droning voice, and the doctor's answers grew slower and more labored, as though he were struggling against a mental fog. I imagined that she'd made a mistake with the dosage, that his heart would fail, that his last sensations would be a sharp pain and a lack of breath, that perhaps Al would smirk and he would die knowing that he had been murdered.

But of course, my too-practical mind had to carry the scenario to its conclusion: that the evidence we were after was somehow not there, and we, the killers of a prominent and respected psychiatrist, would go to prison, to death, or worst of all, to Arkham.

But Al knew what she was doing.

The voices trailed off. Moments later, I met Al out in the hall. Beyond her, within the lounge's warm circle of light, I could see Dr. Crane asleep on the lumpy couch, his feet hanging over the edge. In sleep he looked almost boyish. Al had taken off his glasses and spread her own coat over him like a blanket.

She dropped the key into my hand.

"You have about an hour. When he wakes up, I'll stall him long enough for you to hide."

"Could there be someone else behind all this?" I asked, feeling my first real misgivings. Dr. Crane had always been retiring but unfailingly polite to everyone who worked for him, from the other doctors to the hired help. He might not have been anyone's buddy, but for the moment I couldn't envision that slumbering child in the next room injecting a drug into an old lady that would bring her fears to life and torment her until death was her only escape.

"Only one way to find out," said Al.

Only one way.


	5. Mistakes

He had seemed so kind at first…

Into the doctor's office, find the flashlight, turn it on.

…when he took over my mother's treatment…

Weak beam of light, turn of the key.

…keeping me informed of her condition…

Black metal filing cabinets filling the room.

…how well she was responding…

Straight to the Bs, straight to the end, flip straight to Burke, Elaine P.

…she was responding so well.

"I'm coming home soon," my mother told me the day before she killed herself. "Dr. Crane won't keep me here anymore. He agrees that it's time for me to leave Arkham. I'm so much better now, and I have so much to tell you when I get home."

Blackmail?

That afternoon he gave her the "sedative" scorbuticroton.

I don't know how long I lay there on the floor, holding my mother's crazy papers to my chest the way I used to hold my dolls. I could almost feel her presence in the room, berating me ever so gently for taking so long to figure it out.

This time when I closed my eyes and saw my dead mother's face in the water, I also envisioned Dr. Crane's hand on the back of her neck.

I ripped file after file from the cabinets at random, looking only at the final pages, throwing them to the floor when I was done.

They told me everything I needed to know.

Every single patient who had died after receiving a heavy dose of scarecrow had gone out by suicide or heart failure. They were—and I shudder even now to clear the way for such an obviously bad joke—literally scared to death.

I went back into Dr. Crane's office and smashed the lock on his bottom drawer, intent on giving the doctor a double handful of his own medicine.

It was then that the doorknob turned, and it dawned on me that I hadn't been listening to the vents.

I looked up to see Dr. Crane's tall, thin frame silhouetted in the doorway.

"What—" he started, seeing me.

"Wait! I have to stall you!" Al bellowed, and dove forward to grab his trousers and the waistband. She hit the floor, taking the pants down with her.

Her extra weight threw him off balance, and he fell, striking his head on the edge of his desk. I recoiled in horror. He didn't get up.

"Oh, my God. We killed him."

"No, he's fine." She turned on the desk light and closed the door. "Let's do stuff to him."

"Stuff?" I repeated hysterically. She was already on her knees beside him, stripping off his jacket and tie. "_My God, Alice! What are you going to do?"_

"Ssh." She took off his shirt, folded it, and tied it over his eyes as a blindfold. Then she took off his cheap cotton undershirt and pressed it against his gushing head wound. "Give me his socks and shoes. We need to tie him up." I did as she said, then started to use his pants to tie his feet together while Al tied his hands behind his back with his jacket.

My fury had died down. I still hated him, yes, I wanted to make him suffer, but at the same time, I felt a little sorry for him, lying there almost naked on the cold wood floor. He looked so vulnerable. In a suit, he looked scrawny; without it, he was positively gaunt. Had I not known what sort of man he really was, I would have been tempted to gather him up in my arms and feed him stew until he put some meat on his bones.

"Hey, wait," said Al. "Don't forget his underwear." I felt my face go scarlet.

"You can't be serious." I went cold all over, shuddering so hard I dropped the knot I was trying to tie. "Al, what are you planning to _do_ to him? I mean, he saw me. Whatever happens, he'll trace it back." I was ready to burst into tears until Al started laughing.

"Don't worry. This place throws weird shadows. He didn't see your face. As long as we keep our voices disguised when he wakes up, he won't trace any of this to us." Not only could I not match her enthusiasm, but I wasn't quite sure I wanted to know what unspeakable acts he would be tracing. "I'm not going to man-rape him," Al insisted. "I just want to shake him up a little. You know, his studies revolved around fear. I prefer humiliation."

Dr. Crane groaned and shifted position slightly. Al gave me a significant look and pulled his jacket tighter around his wrists. I shut my eyes and removed his underwear, touching it with nothing but my thumbs and forefingers, placing it neatly on top of him as quickly as possible. Then I tied his feet together with his pants.

He groaned more loudly and then tried to sit up. Al pushed him firmly back down. He jerked away from her hand.

"Who's there?" he demanded. I was pleased to detect a note of fear in his voice. "Alice?"

"Your intern is gone for the night," Al said in a harsh whisper. "I assure you, doctor, you're quite alone with me." She put her hand on him in a way that could have been sexual or threatening. Kept it there when he tried to squirm away. Dug her nails in to see if he was ticklish.

"Who are you? What do you want?" Her hand moved up to hold his mouth open. Her other hand stuffed his socks inside. I gagged.

"First I want you to stop talking." Dr. Crane squealed in outrage as she tied his necktie over his mouth. She made it tight. I almost felt bad watching him choke on his own socks.

"You may find breathing extremely difficult for the next few hours, so I suggest you don't waste your energy on anything trivial," Al instructed.

I couldn't be completely sure, but he seemed to be trying to tell her something slightly outside the bounds of propriety.

Al pointed at the desk. I stood up silently and picked up a pair of scissors, privately wondering if I really had the stomach for this, or if the smell of blood would remind me of the smell of the drugs.

Al shook her head. I picked up a red marker instead. She smiled.

"Whatever you may be thinking right now, Dr. Crane, I assure you that I don't want your money." She picked up the little handful of change that had fallen out of his pocket and tossed it carelessly at his face. He flinched. "I don't want any 'special favors.' I don't even want you to be afraid." Her sudden laugh made me jump out of my skin. The doctor was clearly not feeling much better about it than I was.

"I want you to know that you _will_ survive the night," she rasped in his ear. "You may be a little battered, but you won't be permanently damaged." She put a finger to his hollowed cheek and pushed, tilting his head to the side. "No, what I want is for you to squirm." The cap came off the marker and she began drawing a series of hearts and lip-prints down the side of his neck. "You will be utterly humiliated." She flipped him over on his stomach and began to write something across his ass. "Utterly." I fought hard not to giggle when I realized that what she was writing was "Batman Was Here."

"You know everyone will laugh at you. But that's nothing new to you, is it?" She flipped him over again, drawing on his chest: a little stick figure with his left nipple for a head. "They've always laughed at you, haven't they? Bullies are drawn to gangly little four-eyes like you. But four-eyes isn't what they called you, is it?" She wrote an S on his forehead.

"Mmmph!"

"Afraid, Jonathan? Haven't you ever been tied up before? I'm sure you have. Were you naked? I don't know if you can tell, but you're completely naked now. Did they ever tie you down and beat you, Jonathan? Did they want to hurt you, or just give you a good scare?" SCARE, echoed the writing on his forehead. "I want you to think about this while I have you. Remember. What happened to you last time? Did they leave you alone all night, alone and scared, tied to the goalpost at the far end of the football field? They thought they had left you close enough to your school for someone to hear you the next morning when you screamed for help. But no one heard you. How long did you hang there, scarecrow?" Dr. Crane flinched. Al smiled and finished writing the word SCARECROW across his forehead. She went back to drawing on his chest as she whispered to him.

"You may be glad to know that you'll be discovered much sooner this time. Those floodlights you installed to track escaping prisoners will shine directly on you tomorrow morning when your subordinates come to work. It will only be a few hours from now before someone finds you. And they'll laugh. And laugh. And laugh. Just like before, Jonathan. Laugh and point at the poor, pathetic joke of a man. At the scrawny little scarecrow. I see you don't like that word. Is that what they called you when you were a child? Poor, pathetic, sad little scarecrow."

--

When Al had every inch of his skin covered with drawings and obscene messages, we dragged him up to the roof. The place was easily accessible because, after all, it didn't make much of an escape route. The drop to the pavement was more than forty feet, the walls too slick to climb, the grounds patrolled by armed guards at night and surrounded by impenetrable walls.

The cold was like a slap in the face. When we let go of his feet, Dr. Crane curled into a ball, shivering. A light snow was falling.

"Cold, doctor?" Al whispered. "Don't worry. All the excess heat from this old building is released up here. I'm going to tie you right next to the vent. You may not be comfortable, but it should keep you warm enough."

It wasn't easy making it seem like just one pair of hands, but we managed to retie his bonds so he was hanging with his bare toes about a foot off the ground, the vent blowing warm air at his back. He was still shivering when we left him, but he would survive.

Al and I watched him from the window at the top of the stairs. He struggled to free himself. He was relatively calm, for now. Soon he would begin to panic and tire himself out.

"What you said before, about being tied to a goalpost…did that really happen?" I asked. Al nodded.

"One of the guards here went to high school with Dr. Crane. Yesterday, we had a nice little chat."

"That poor child." My feelings of pity passed quickly. "What do we do now? This was never part of the plan."

"We wait until morning. When everyone else starts coming in for work, we join the crowd rushing up to the roof. When we discover what a terrible thing some cad has done to our dear Dr. Crane, we call the police and invite them to search his office to see if anything was stolen. If they don't make the connection between the drugs in his desk and all those files you dumped on the floor, we can always tip them later."

"Then we should probably take a sample with us, just in case."

We watched Dr. Crane until he finally stopped struggling and slumped over, defeated. Then we went downstairs.


	6. Screams

I've always been able to wake myself up when I need to, so I thought it would be safe for us to fall asleep in Dr. Crane's office.

I woke up a little after 3:00, shivering.

"What happened to the heat?" Al mumbled. I listened carefully.

"The pipes aren't rattling." It was then that I remembered my patients' occasional complaints of the boiler dying in the middle of the night. It had happened only twice since I'd started working there. And this made three.

We ran up the stairs to the window at roof level. Dr. Crane was still hanging there, limp, right where we'd left him.

"Oh, shit! His feet are blue!"

We ran out and untied him. He fell to the ground, unmoving. Al ripped off his tie and let the socks fall out of his mouth. This was the part where he should have gasped for breath. He didn't.

I started hyperventilating.

"We—weren't—supposed—to—kill—him!"

Al put her fingers to the side of his neck.

"Heart's still beating. Get him inside."

We each took an arm and dragged him into the building, being much more gentle than we had been getting him out of it, and quicker, too. At the top of the stairs, I lost my grip on his arm. I grabbed for him. Missed. Al started to lose her balance. I grabbed her instead. She let him go.

I burst into tears as he went tumbling down the stairs.

"Stop crying," Al demanded as we ran after him. "We can still fix this."

"Fix it how?" We picked him up and rushed him into his office.

"I don't know. Somehow." We dropped him on the rug.

"Get our coats from the lounge. Blankets if you can find any. We need to get him warm." My medical training was starting to kick in. I pinched his nose shut, tilted his head back, bent down to his icy, blue lips, and breathed into his mouth.

It was my first time doing mouth-to-mouth outside of class. The fact that I couldn't stop crying was working against me. I could feel his heartbeat getting weaker by the second.

Al burst in with a stack of blankets from the supply closet, her coat (I had left mine in the bathroom, I remembered then) and two bottles of water.

"We can't give him water!"

"Microwaved it. Put them in his armpits." She unfolded a blanket while I breathed into his mouth again.

Helping her cover him with the blanket, I felt his chest rise under my hand. I heard him draw a breath on his own.

"Oh, thank God."

Al got up and went to his desk. I continued wrapping him in the blankets—too many of them, although I didn't realize it at the time.

"We can still do this." Her voice was shaking. "We'll get him warmed up. In a few hours, it'll be safe for us to sit him up for a little while. He'll be a little bruised from the fall, nothing more serious than that. When everyone starts coming in, we can tie him up again…leave him in his chair this time…" She looked like she was going to be sick.

"Oh, what are _you_ so worked up about, princess?"

"Look, just because my old man could pull a job without breaking a sweat doesn't mean I…" Her voice dropped to a whisper. "I just wanted to shake him up a little."

"Yeah…me, too." I put my arms around him, using my own body heat to warm him. I left the blindfold on—he wouldn't be getting up anytime soon, but he could regain consciousness for a few seconds at a time, and there was no way I was letting him see me after all this.

Al took the red marker and a piece of paper, and started writing him a note. I could hear her whispering the words as she wrote them down.

Dr. Crane moaned faintly. I felt his arm move, realized he was coming to, and pulled away before he could feel the shape of my female body.

"It was never my intention to kill you, Dr. Crane," Al wrote, "in spite of your many crimes. You may want to invest in some routine maintenance for your—_look out_!" Glass broke. I only had time to close my eyes and turn slightly away before the handful of powder hit my in the face. "Don't breathe!" Al screamed. "Don't breathe!" She grabbed the back of my shirt and dragged me to my feet. I felt her slapping my face with her shirtsleeve as we ran.

"Mmm!" I said, fighting the urge to inhale.

"Think I got it." I opened my eyes, ran my own hand over my face, felt no remaining powder, and inhaled.

There must have been traces of it left. When I inhaled, everything distorted. My heart rate must have tripled in that second. But running was exactly what I needed to do, and Al was there to steer me in the right direction.

"Guard," Al whispered, forcing me to slow to a walk. We approached the front desk, IDs handy.

"Working late, girls?" the night guard asked.

"Didn't realize how late it was," Al said brightly.

"You aren't going out without coats, are you?" Al laughed vapidly. "At this time of night? In the Narrows?"

"Who would rob us?" Al asked.

"The buses don't run this late."

"We like to walk."

"But…"

"Open the damn door," I snapped.

Ten seconds later, we were out in the street…in the cold…

…and suddenly I was back at the pond…the ice cracked under my skates…

"E equals mc squared," Al said. We kept running.

Halfway back to the apartment, someone stepped out of the shadows ahead of us. He might have pulled a gun. We knocked him down and kept running.

Same thing happened a few minutes later. A group this time. Al skidded to a stop, staring at the leader.

"Gene?"

His ugly mug split into a big grin.

"Hey, it's the princess. How's your pop?"

"In prison. But my friend and I are in trouble. Think we could hole up with the boys?"

"Sorry, no can do. Everyone split when Big Al got nabbed. Most of us will go back to him when he gets out, but…"

"Yeah, I get it. Think you could get me a car, then?"

"Ten minutes. Wait here." They melted into the shadows.

I sank to my knees on the sidewalk.

"You going to make it?" Al asked.

"Yeah." I was shaking, but mostly from the cold. "Everything's all…weird and…twisty-like, but…" I took a deep breath. "Truth is stranger than fiction, and reality is scaring me a lot more than that stuff could."

Al sat down beside me.

"Courage, young one. We'll get out of this yet."

Five minutes later, a car pulled up. A junker, but a car was a car. When Gene got out, Al kissed him on the cheek and gave him the bottle she'd taken from Dr. Crane's office.

"Thanks, babe. If you can, get this to the cops, but don't get yourself in trouble on account of me. It belongs to Jonathan Crane."

"I'll do what I can. Where are you headed now?"

"I hear Metropolis is lovely this time of year."

I kept my eyes glued to the rearview mirror until I saw the Gotham skyline growing small behind us. About that time, the heater kicked in, and I drifted off to sleep.

--

I woke up on the floor of Dr. Crane's office. He was lying beside me, still blindfolded and wrapped in blankets, one arm slung across his chest, powder stuck to his hand. Al was gone.

I was on my feet and running before I even began to think.

She didn't leave me before. She wouldn't leave me now.

_You're dreaming._

--

I woke up in the car next to Al.

"Bad dreams?" she asked sympathetically.

"Yeah. Are we there yet?"

"Look around you. Beautiful Metropolis." I sat up and looked out the window, wide-eyed.

"It's so…clean! And look! The snow sticks!"

"Fuck!" Al screamed, and slammed on the brakes. As the car spun around on the icy road, I saw…him again…standing in the middle of the street with a smile on his face.

_He couldn't have gotten here so fast—_

--

I woke again on the floor with Dr. Crane's piercing blue eyes inches from my own—

--

--and on the roof, naked, bound, and gagged—

--

--and blindfolded, with Al screaming for help—

--

--and in a hospital gown in my mother's room—

--

--and strapped to a table, lost amid the screams in Ward 5.

--

That last one was real. Dr. Crane—the Scarecrow—was captured and committed to Arkham himself. After a few days, the drugs wore off and the drips ran out, and we (most of us) returned to lucidity just in time to watch ourselves starve to death.

It was Al who saved us. She managed not to panic, and got us all screaming the same thing. After a few hours of the song that never ends, the laundry women called some guards and went in to investigate the boiler room.

They got us out, twenty-nine of us with our minds intact. Three more were released after years of therapy. The rest stayed in the State Psychiatric Hospital for the rest of their lives, which wasn't very long for most of them.

No one suggested keeping them at Arkham. The very thought of the place would set them all to screaming like you've never heard in your life.

As for Dr. Crane, he escaped Arkham after a very short stay, and is currently at large.

I changed my name, I moved to another state, I lived my life for years without ever seeing his face or the mask he uses now. But I have not fallen asleep once in all this time without fearing that when I woke up, it would be with his blue eyes boring into mine and his toxin back in my lungs.

Or maybe all these years of paranoia have been just another dream, and I'm still in Ward 5 with all the others.

Sometimes I call Al just to make sure she isn't screaming.

She feels the same way.


End file.
